yaksha names
why everyone is wrong abt "alatus" as xiao's true name
originally formulated 4 june 2022.
it's common fanon that xiao's "true name" or whatever is "alatus", that this was the name which his prior master used to control him prior to zhongli freeing him. i reject this headcanon and maintain that xiao's "true name" isn't something we have been made privy to in canon, and that "alatus" is something more of a military name.
allow me to demonstrate why.
first, look at this table derived from the wiki's list of yaksha:
| cn name | (en ver.) | military title | (en ver.) | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 金鵬 | alatus | 金鵬大將 | general alatus | 鵬 → mythical bird. |
| 浮舍 | bosacius | 騰蛇太元帥 | marshal vitras | 蛇 → snake |
| 應達 | indarias | 火鼠大將 | general musatas | 鼠 → mouse/rat |
| 伐難 | bonanus | 螺捲大將 | general chizapus | 螺 → snail |
| 彌怒 | menogias | 心猿大將 | general kapisas | 猿 → ape |
(this is only tangentially related but the mi in minu [彌] is similar to the word used in 小獼猴, which are funky little taiwanese monkeys, one of whom once stole my donut. like right out of my fucking hand. but that's not important right now.)
anyway. i didn't put the name "xiao" on this table because, well… where would it go? there's a clear consistency to the yaksha names (aside from xiao's on several levels) that is nonetheless a bit messy to explain, mostly because the localizers had likely painted themselves into a corner early on with the constellations, but i guess i'll give it a shot.
some of you may already be familiar with the fact that xiao's constellation, alatus nemeseos, is 金翅鵬王, and that jinpeng got localized into "alatus". this is because all genshin constellations get localized into latin, which i'm theoretically fine with, but then when xiao was released and we had the yaksha trailer, i guess the localizers felt the need to maintain a sense of consistency w/the yaksha names and proceeded to give all of them latin names, as seen in column two. there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to the cn versions anyway, so this felt fine for the time.
however, then the perilous trails quest dropped, and xiao revealed that all the other foremost yaksha had Alternate Military Names to the ones we knew them by from the xiaoquest yaksha cutscene.